A Proper Goodbye
by strikingtwelves
Summary: Time was always running out on him, so he made sure not to leave anything unsaid. "Clara, if you're seeing this, it most likely means that I'm gone… and that I'm never coming back." A Doctor/Clara one-shot, set during the events after TDotD.


**Title: **A Proper Goodbye  
**Pairing: **Eleven/Clara, Twelve/Clara  
**Rating: **K+  
**Word count: **2,642  
**Summary: **Time was always running out on him, so he made sure not to leave anything unsaid. "_Clara, if you're seeing this, it most likely means that I'm gone… and that I'm never coming back."_  
**Author's Note: **Massive thanks to **Little Lushy Lion** for proof-reading for me! (What would I do without you, Desi?)

This is an attempt at filling the gaps left by Matt Smith's Doctor in _TTotD_. I'm stoked for Capaldi, but Smith is my Doctor, and I will probably never fully recover from his exit. This is the result of my first, legitimate heartbreak. Cheers.

* * *

**A Proper Goodbye  
**_[Well, you see her when you fall asleep;_  
_never to touch and never to keep,_  
_because you loved her too much_  
_and you dived too deep.]_

* * *

He can't sleep.

Well, technically, he _can_, but tonight (and all the other nights this past week), he finds himself incapable of sleeping.

He'd close his eyes and drift off for a minute or two, and then wake up right before it really sets in. He'd sit up from his bed, tinker with his Sonic, stand on his head, recalibrate the TARDIS, change the desktop (only to change it back again), then plop back on his bed, hoping he'd done enough to actually get some this time.

He doesn't.

Certainly, he'd be tired, but he _still couldn't sleep_, and he wonders why the Universe just can't give him a break. (_Really? _After all he's done?)

Seven nights in a row and the Doctor hasn't had one wink of proper sleep. (Granted, Time Lords don't need sleep as much as humans do, but they only usually go around three to four nights without it.) By the time he's reached the eighth, he decides to give it up.

Just in his dress shirt and the trousers he had on this morning, he slips on a pair of fuzzy slippers and exits his room, resolving to wander about the TARDIS to keep himself busy: find something that needed fixing, do a bit of cleaning up along the way, maybe visit the library for a good old dusting. He hasn't been there in a while, he realizes. Clara's made it clear that that part of the ship was hers now – especially claiming that spot in the corner as her study – even though the TARDIS would always throw her off by changing where it was every now and again.

Never stopped her, though. She always found it in the end.

_Clara. _

That's what's been keeping him awake.

He's been thinking about her a lot lately, more often now after his encounter with his past selves, and his thoughts have been eating away at him, weighing on his chest like the burden of an untold truth.

This is his last body.

This – this version of him – this is _it_, and he's gone. For good.

He's had over a millennium to come to terms with the process – different bodies leading the same, complicated life – but every time he'd trudge dangerously close to death, he's had to witness a part of him slip away with everything that came with it. Twelve regenerations and here he is. Now this has got to come to a close, too.

And then there's Clara.

Brave, smart, _beautiful _Clara.

And she was either going to see him die_,_ or wait for him _every Wednesday _that came after, not knowing. Never knowing.

Sometimes, when the walls weren't as strong, he'd catch her crying – one time, after she sacrificed the most important leaf in human history to save a strange man she barely even knew; another time, when she thought he was going to die in Trenzalore – and every single time, the sight would break his hearts, and strengthen his resolve to never have to see Clara Oswald cry ever again.

That was his consolation. He has the option (the freedom) to try and make her feel better; to physically be there for her even when she tells him he doesn't have to. He's made it a task to stop the tears from ever falling, to patch up every wound anyone's ever left, to make her day with an attempt at a breakfast-in-bed (a plate of burnt pancakes and a steaming cup of tea).

Who was going to do all that when he's gone?

(The very thought of being the cause of her tears sends a clenched fist directly to the wall. The TARDIS bellows in concern.)

He doesn't know how or when he'd breathe his last. (He knows _where_, but that's hardly any help.) What he does know, though, is that he is _not_ going to leave anything unsaid.

Not this time.

* * *

He's sleeping now.

It was hard to finally get him to rest. His entire body was burning up, and his hearts were erratically thumping against his chest. She took a towel and had it run under the tap, squeezing the water out and folding it to put on his head. He'd been talking _nonstop _since his transformation, and she's had to shush him multiple times to get him to finally shut up. She held his hand throughout the entire thing; until his breathing evened, until the grip he had on her hand relaxed in her palm.

It had been trickier than usual. Taking longer than the average regeneration process, he had told her, but he was going to be fine.

He promised he would be.

If Clara was going to be honest, it was _weird_, seeing him change… seeing this version of him that's _him _but not really him – the Doctor, but not _her _Doctor. She genuinely doesn't know how she is supposed to go about this now. She doesn't know what to feel.

He's different. _This Doctor_ is different. A different face, different body, different accent. He looks a little older than his past self and acts a littler older as well. He doesn't talk like him, doesn't feel like him, and she knows while this is still the same strange man who knocked on her door dressed as a monk all those years ago, he was _never _going to be him. _The Eleventh_.

The Eleventh didn't have eyebrows. The Eleventh was too tall. The Eleventh had the most conspicuous of chins and ears that looked like rocket fins.

But the Doctor is still _alive_, and she finds that that's enough.

Because she's aware she's like this now, and it's going to take an awful lot of time before she warms up to _this _version of the Doctor, but she's certain she is going to love him anyway. He is going to be wonderful and magical and he is still going to be _him_, even without the bow tie.

"Even without the bow tie," she tells herself, allowing a small smile to form on her lips.

Feeling slightly better, she looks him over one last time before leaving his bedside and heading for the control room. Successfully not getting lost, she walks up the steps and circles the console, gingerly letting her hand skim through the buttons before deciding to take a seat on the chair. Seconds later, she feels the TARDIS settle in for landing, the familiar, pompous _thud _resonating within the room like a siren. Confused, she gets up and walks to the door, pulling it open to reveal that they've landed in front of her complex, on the same spot he had parked the TARDIS just a few hours before.

The sun had just set, the lampposts flickering on as the last of the orange light disappears into the horizon. She knows her family is probably still in her apartment waiting for her, but she doesn't feel like explaining herself to them today, not after everything that's happened. Sighing, she closes the door behind her and walks back to her chair, pulling her legs to her chest as the weight of it all strikes her once again.

"_Clara, if you're seeing this, it most likely means that I'm gone… and that I'm never coming back."_

That voice – she'd recognize it anywhere. Slowly lifting her head up to see, a hologram of the old Doctor was now projected right in front of her, looking to the space above where she was seated.

He looked exactly like how she remembered, except he looked a bit more tired now than she's seen him last. His hair disheveled, dress shirt messily tucked in his trousers, his bow tie undone around his collar… he looked very worn, and very upset, but whatever this was, and whatever its purpose, she wanted to believe, for just a second, that he was real.

"_You've seen me. All of me. All twelve faces, and you know me. Better than anyone. My Clara."_

"_The thing with regeneration… it has a limit. All Time Lords are only allowed twelve regenerations – thirteen different bodies of the same person – and I'm afraid I've hit my last."_

"_You've met the Warrior, and while I didn't call myself the Doctor then, he was still an incarnation. The Doctor that came before me regenerated twice, counting this_," he gestures to himself,_ "as my thirteenth and final body."_

"_When I die, that's it."_

She knows this. He told her this when they were up on the rooftop back in Christmas, catching the first few minutes of dawn before the light would have gone off for several more years. And she knows, for a fact, that he _doesn't_. He doesn't die there. He didn't die then, because he was _here_, in the TARDIS, in his bedroom, fast asleep.

He is _alive. _What is he going on about?

"_I don't know how it's going to happen. I haven't got the slightest clue. It could happen anytime, Clara, and you could be there to see it, or not be there and never know. Either way, I wasn't going to risk it."_

"_I've rerouted the TARDIS to materialise back in your apartment should anything happen to me, and she will know when to show this. She may seem unreliable at times, but she's got a timing of her own, this clever little thing,"_ he trails off, looking at the console, his mouth stretching into a fond smile. _"Besides, this ship has taken a liking to you, Clara Oswald. And quite right, too!__ I knew it was only a matter of time__…"_ He grins._  
_

_"Anyway, the TARDIS won't stay for long. She will show you this message and return to me right after. Don't try to get in with her. She won't let you."_

"You make it sound like it's going to happen," she tells him, despite knowing full-well she wasn't going to get a reply. "You make it sound like you can't escape it, but you _did. _You did and you're alive and this just doesn't make any _sense_, Doctor–."

"_I couldn't sleep tonight. It had only been a little over a week since I met my past regenerations and I… I counted today. I counted the lives I lived and the lives I lost and I never thought I was going to stop counting."_

This is a recording, Clara realizes. A recording he did after they met Ten and the War Doctor. He couldn't have known then that he would end up in Christmas; that the Time Lords would help him in his last moments. He couldn't have known that he was offered a new beginning, and for her sake, he was just planning in advance.

Something Clara hasn't seen him done, ever.

"_I've always imagined it happening, death. Dreamed of it, even. There was something about the finality of the word that both scared and relieved me. If you've lived for as long as I have, eventually you are going to want to turn it all in. Give up. Wait out the years 'till you wither out and grow sour. And I was about to, you see, until I met you."_

"_I know you don't quite remember. I'm not asking you to. But that night, in Victorian London… I was never going to go back. I've lost so much and the Universe wasn't doing me any favours. Oh, but you were persistent! Dragged me out of my sulking and I didn't even notice until we were already at it, running together. Running away."_

"_Thank you, Clara. For everything. I know I don't get to say it as much but I am truly, truly grateful that I found you. Or that you found me. It was always you who found me in the end, wasn't it? My impossible girl."_

"_Thank you for being funny, for being brave, for running away with me and holding my hand. Thank you for the many times you've saved my life, sacrificing your own. Thank you for knowing… always knowing and understanding. I can't possibly thank you enough."_

"_And I'm sorry that I have to go. I'm sorry that you had to be the last. I'm sorry for all the Wednesdays that I couldn't come, for all the planets you never got to see. But for whatever time we've got left together, I need it to come from this face. I need you to know that I will never forget you, Clara Oswald, even in the life that comes after this, if there is one. I want to go knowing I've said a proper goodbye."_

"_And if I have to push you away, know that it is more for your sake than mine. The very second you agreed to travel with me, I let you put your life on the line, but I was foolish to do that. I could never leave without knowing for certain that you were safe and far from harm. Because__… because_ every saved life is a victory, Clara, and yours will be my greatest."

Blinking rapidly, she gets up from her seat and walks up to him, looking him straight in the eye and searching for any sign of _him _still in there. A sign of his consciousness that will give her the closure; _anything._ She wants to touch his face but she's afraid of confirmation. She wills to put her arms back to her sides.

"_Do me a favour, though? Keep making those soufflés."_

And in that last second, before he could have said his final words, he looks down at her and _she knows it's him. _He can see her through the projection and it makes her chest ache even more. He lifts his hand to touch her face, and gently wipes at the single tear rolling off her cheek with his thumb. She closes her eyes; revels in it, in their last moment together, and then he says it.

_"My hearts are always with you, Clara Oswald. It has been absolutely brilliant with you."_

And he's gone.

So she lets the tears fall.

* * *

"Clara, wasn't it? Clara Oswald?"

"You remember?"

"It seems like most of my memory's come back to me now, yes."

"That's good. What did you need?"

"Well, uh… you don't happen to know how to make a soufflé, do you?"

* * *

**/fin.**


End file.
